The present invention relates to a radio paging receiver having a message display function.
There have been available various radio paging receivers having a message display function of storing a received message in a memory and displaying the received message on a display unit depending on an operation by a user. Recently, as new services using radio waves, information services about, for example, weather forecast and news have been offered for the radio paging receivers and the like.
Under these circumstances, demands for further advanced functions of the radio paging receivers have been increased. Specifically, it is not sufficient only to perform readout and display of a received message in response to a command from a user, but such a function has been demanded that received messages are managed so as to quickly offer a received message/messages corresponding to an attribute, for example, a sender or an identification number (ID) desired by the user.
As a conventional technique proposed for satisfying such a demand, a radio paging receiver disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 1-288120 can be cited. The disclosed radio paging receiver has a plurality of paging numbers (ID's) and is capable of receiving a call using any of these ID's. In this radio paging receiver, a received message and a corresponding ID are stored in a memory in a pair. In response to a given operation by the user, the radio paging receiver carries out readout and display of received messages in sequence from new to old per ID or relative to all the ID's.
In general, a message received by a radio paging receiver is not immediately read out, but stored in a memory without confirmation by a user, while it may happen that the user confirms the received message at once upon receipt. For example, in general, the radio paging receiver can be set so as not to notify receipt of a message to the user. In this case, even if the message is received, the user does not notice it. For solving such an inconvenience, the radio paging receiver is provided with a function of notifying presence of a non-read message whose contents are not confirmed by the user and performing readout and display of such a non-read message depending on an operation by the user.
However, the conventional radio paging receiver only displays all the non-read messages in sequence from new to old, and does not display a remaining state of the non-read messages per attribute (for example, ID). Thus, it is quite inconvenient for the user to confirm the non-read message remaining state of a desired attribute. Further, it sometimes happens that, when a plurality of non-read messages belonging to the same attribute are stored in a memory, the user may wish to read them successively. However, since the conventional radio paging receiver is not provided with such a function, the user can not quickly confirm the non-read messages belonging to a particular attribute which the user wishes to check.